POSH Act compliance: what Indian employers actually have to do

Most companies I review are not deliberately non-compliant with the POSH Act. They constituted an Internal Committee at some point, appointed someone external, and considered the matter closed. Then a complaint arrives, and it turns out the committee has never met, two of its members have left the company, the external member’s contact details are three years old, and no annual report has ever been filed.

At that point the organisation is defending two things at once: the complaint, and its own non-compliance. The second is usually the harder of the two.

Here is what the Act actually requires, in the order it matters.

1. Constitute the Internal Committee — at ten employees

The obligation begins at ten or more employees. Not ten women. Ten employees.

This catches out growing companies constantly, because the threshold arrives long before anyone is thinking about formal HR. A funded startup will typically cross ten people months before it hires its first HR person, and the obligation is already live.

The committee’s composition is specified, not left to the employer:

• A Presiding Officer, who must be a woman employed at a senior level at the workplace
• At least two members from among employees, preferably committed to the cause of women or with relevant social work or legal experience
• One external member from a non-governmental organisation or association committed to the cause of women, or a person familiar with issues relating to sexual harassment
• At least half the total members must be women

The most common defect I find is a committee constituted entirely from whoever was available, with no external member at all, and no woman at senior level as Presiding Officer.

2. Appoint an external member who is actually reachable

The external member requirement is not a formality, and it is the requirement most often treated as one.

The member must be genuinely independent of the employer. Appointing your own retained lawyer, your auditor, or a friendly consultant who does other paid work for you creates an obvious problem if the appointment is ever examined.

Two practical points that matter more than they sound:

The appointment needs to be current. An external member appointed in 2021 who has since changed roles, cities or phone numbers is not an external member. Confirm annually.

The member needs to actually understand enquiry procedure. When a complaint arrives, the external member is frequently the only person in the room who has done this before. A member who cannot guide the committee on notice, evidence, cross-examination and natural justice is not adding what the Act intended them to add.

3. Publish the policy, and put it where people can see it

The Act requires the employer to display the penal consequences of sexual harassment and the constitution of the Internal Committee at a conspicuous place in the workplace.

In practice this means:

• A written POSH policy that does not contradict your employee handbook
• The names and contact details of every IC member, displayed and current
• The complaint procedure, in plain language
• Reasonable accessibility for a distributed or remote workforce — a noticeboard in a head office does not serve employees who have never been to it

4. Run awareness programmes — and keep the records

The employer must carry out awareness programmes for employees and orient IC members on their responsibilities.

The compliance value of training is real but secondary. The larger value is evidentiary. If a complaint is ever examined, an employer that can produce dated attendance records for annual awareness sessions is in a materially different position from one that says training “was covered during induction.”

Two distinct programmes are needed, and they are not interchangeable:

• Employee awareness — what constitutes harassment, what the policy says, how to complain, what protection against retaliation exists
• IC orientation — enquiry procedure, timelines, evidence, confidentiality, report writing

5. Know the enquiry procedure before you need it

This is where most organisations come undone, and it is entirely avoidable.

The broad framework:

• A complaint should ordinarily be made within three months of the incident, with the committee empowered to extend that period for recorded reasons
• Conciliation may be attempted if the complainant requests it, and no monetary settlement may form the basis of conciliation
• Where the matter proceeds to enquiry, the respondent must receive the complaint and be given a genuine opportunity to respond
• Both parties must be heard, with an opportunity to be examined
• The enquiry should be completed within ninety days
• The report goes to the employer, who must act on the recommendations within sixty days

The failures I see repeatedly are procedural rather than substantive: the respondent was never given a copy of the complaint, the committee reached a conclusion without hearing the respondent’s witnesses, no contemporaneous record was maintained, or confidentiality was breached during the process.

An employer with a strong factual case and a defective process is in a worse position than one with a weaker case and a clean one.

6. File the annual report

The Internal Committee must prepare an annual report and the employer must file it with the District Officer. It records the number of complaints received, disposed of, and pending beyond ninety days, along with the awareness programmes conducted.

Filing a nil report is still filing. Organisations with no complaints frequently assume there is nothing to file, and the absence of any filing history is one of the first things that surfaces if compliance is examined.

7. Review annually

A short annual cycle prevents nearly every problem described above:

• Confirm every IC member is still employed and still willing
• Confirm the external member’s appointment and contact details are current
• Reconstitute if anyone has left
• Run the awareness session and retain attendance records
• Prepare and file the annual report
• Confirm the displayed policy and contact details are current

That is perhaps half a day of work per year. Reconstructing three years of absent compliance after a complaint has been filed takes considerably longer, and happens under far worse conditions.

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Where employers most often go wrong

In order of how frequently I encounter it:

1. No external member, or one appointed years ago and never confirmed since
2. The committee has never been trained, so its first enquiry is also its first exposure to the procedure
3. The annual report has never been filed, including nil reports
4. The threshold was crossed unnoticed — the company grew past ten employees and nobody connected that to an obligation
5. The policy contradicts the handbook, usually because both were adapted from different templates
6. Remote and distributed employees have no practical access to the policy or the committee

None of these are difficult to fix. All of them are difficult to fix retrospectively, under pressure, with a live complaint in progress.

If you are unsure where your organisation stands, the fastest way to find out is to try to answer three questions: who is your external member, when did the committee last meet, and when was the last annual report filed. If any of those takes more than a minute to answer, it is worth a proper review.